When you've poured gallons of sweat and stacks of cash into a beloved project car, your heart gets crushed by Fate's hobnailed boot when you come home to discover it's been totaled while parked.

That's what happened to Bill, California Melee and 24 Hours Of LeMons veteran (and housemate of TheEastBayKid), a couple weeks back. You see, Bill lives in the Laurel District of Oakland, a pleasant neighborhood in a city that gets a mostly undeserved bad rap from the rest of the country; however, much as I (a former Oakland resident) love the place- it is true that it's a tough town for cars. The OPD deals with matters more pressing than traffic-law enforcement, and happy hour tends to be a 24/7 affair for many Oaktown drivers. You're rolling the dice every time you park your car on the street, and this time the dice came up snake-eyes for Bill's '69 MGB-GT. Your classic hit-and-run wreck, with the MG mashed into a tree and the only clue left behind by the perp (probably behind the wheel of a late-70s Pontiac Bonneville) a broken Olde English 800 40-dog, no doubt dropped out the driver's window at the moment of impact. Bill hasn't decided whether he wants to let sentimental value trump rational thought and try to fix the car in a massive sheetmetal weld-a-thon, or just pull all the snazzy aftermarket performance bits off it and start over with another MGB. Check out Bill's blog to get the whole story.[Bill's Buckets]